Educational initiatives in many minority language communities in Europe and beyond are producing 'new speakers' of the languages in question. The status of such speakers is often contested, however, and many people who have been through immersion education in a minority language can find themselves on the fringes of the language community of which…

In this paper, we study the phenomenon of linguistic mudes or transformations in linguistic practices, in the case of highly proficient speakers of Irish, Basque and Catalan and we investigate the extent to which speakers in the three contexts share ideologies and experiences related to the process. Such an investigation will deepen understanding…

As a result of internationalisation, many universities have developed policies that encourage publications in English. This study explores this issue by examining multilingual scholars' experiences of publishing policies in an Anglophone context and more specifically within the discipline of foreign languages--an inherently plurilingual discipline…

Interviews with a small group of doctoral students at a British university indicate that the students feel that the programme provides an environment within which they develop interculturality through reflexive engagement with the PhD community and in some cases with the participants in their research. Significant here is that they are…

The focus of this paper is on the relationship between Albanian speakers' ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) perceptions and their language maintenance, language use and choice patterns. A subjective EV questionnaire, and a language usage questionnaire capturing domain-specific language use was completed by 200 Albanian immigrants of first and second…

Sociocultural and socio-economic conditions (e.g. subsistence family farming needs) as well as the absence of nearby public schools result in Ghanaian youth, primarily from rural areas, not receiving formal schooling. Because of this, children may never learn to read and write. One solution is a complementary education programme (CEP) that…

The mixed-method study presented in this paper investigates the changes in direct and indirect intercultural contact and language-learning attitudes and effort of international students in the United Kingdom. Seventy international learners of English were asked to fill in a questionnaire three times during one academic year in an international…

This thematic collection of four papers explores a number of perspectives on companies in which multiple languages are used. The "organisational" perspective concerns the question of how the presence of or demand for multiple languages in the company is managed--how companies are guided by national and other policies in regard to the use…

This article aims to develop the concept of ethnolinguistic vitality by adopting a qualitative approach to vitality rather than the statistical approach traditionally used. Ten small-size focus group style interviews were held with members of the Welsh-Argentinean community in the Chubut Province in the south of Argentina in order to explore…

In recently arrived immigrant families, children and young people often act as language brokers for their parents and other adults. In public and academic debate, this activity is sometimes portrayed negatively as imposing excessive burdens of responsibility on the young people. This paper reports an analysis of qualitative data from a broader…

This paper summarises the results of a qualitative study which focused on 60 Malay students aged 17-19 years in Brunei Darussalam. It explored the interplay of factors that colour the participants' attitude to the English language and its role in their education as well as in their lives. Brunei's status as a former British protectorate was taken…

This study explored language shift and accommodation among bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi (also called Hokkien, Holo, Tai-gu, Taiwan Min, Taiwanese) families in Taiwan. From the 1940s until the 1980s the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taiwan promoted Mandarin Chinese. Recent years have witnessed a shift in policy: since 2001 elementary schools…